The religious issue (second part)
In his political theory, Moses Mendelssohn had to criticize the present conditions of the Prussian state, and he did without mentioning it, partly for reasons of censorship and partly for rhetorical reasons. This was his polite way to say that its regent was centuries behind his own philosophy:
Ich habe das Glück, in einem Staate zu leben, in welchem diese meine Begriffe weder neu, noch sonderlich auffallend sind. Der weise Regent, von dem er beherrscht wird, hat es, seit Anfang seiner Regierung, beständig sein Augenmerk seyn lassen, die Menschheit in Glaubenssachen, in ihr volles Recht einzusetzen. […] Mit weiser Mäßigung hat er zwar die Vorrechte der äußern Religion geschont, in deren Besitz er sie gefunden. Noch gehören vielleicht Jahrhunderte von Cultur und Vorbereitung dazu, bevor die Menschen begreifen werden, daß Vorrechte um der Religion willen weder rechtlich, noch im Grunde nützlich seyen, und daß es also eine wahre Wohlthat seyn würde, allen bürgerlichen Unterschied um der Religion willen schlechterdings aufzuheben. Indessen hat sich die Nation unter der Regierung dieses Weisen so sehr an Duldung und Vertragsamkeit in Glaubenssachen gewöhnt, daß Zwang, Bann und Ausschließungsrecht wenigstens aufgehört haben, populäre Begriffe zu seyn.
I have the fortune to live in a state in which my opinions are neither new nor very extraordinary. Its wise regent who rules it, paid always, since the beginning of his reign, attention, that mankind gets its full right concerning all affairs of faith [literally: believe, confession]. […] With wise moderateness he preserved the privilege of the formal religion as he had found it. There are still centuries of civilization and preparation before us, when man will finally understand that privileges of a certain religion are neither based on law nor on the religion's own fundament, so that it will be a real benefit to abolish simply any civil divergence in favour of one religion. However under the rule of this Wise the nation got so accustomed to tolerance and compatibility in respect to other religions, that at least force, bann and the right to exclude are no longer popular terms.
In consequence, the second part on religious power had to criticize the present conditions of that religion which he always had to defend during his life. For these critics he needed the idea that state and religion should be divided, but kept in harmony, as well as the utopic postulation of a just state which should be the political target of a religious community. After this preparation, the finding of the preconditions in his political theory (the key or better: the ring in his whole argumentation), the first step was to comment the misconceived points of view: the adaptation to despotism, as it was postulated by many Christians discussing the "amelioration of the Jews".
Therefore, Moses Mendelssohn refers to his older arguments which he used in his dispute with Lavater – and more recently in response to an anonymous recension of Mendelssohn's introduction to Menassah Ben Israel's Vindication of the Jews. With the medieval metaphor of masonry for the art of memory (often represented allegorically as "prudence") and its reference to religious education as a moral and sentimental education, he tried to turn back Lavater's projection. While Christians like to regard the crisis of Judaism, Mendelssohn regards the present situation – in the eve of the French Revolution – as a general crisis of religion:
Wenn es wahr ist, daß die Ecksteine meines Hauses austreten, und das Gebäude einzustürzen drohet, ist es wohlgethan, wenn ich meine Habseligkeit aus dem untersten Stokwerke in das oberste rette? Bin ich da sicherer? Nun ist das Christentum, wie Sie wissen, auf dem Judentume gebauet, und muß nothwendig, wenn dieses fällt, mit ihm über einen Hauffen stürzen.
If it is true, that the cornerstones of my house had become so weak, that the building might tumble down, shall I follow the advice to save my goods from the ground to the upper floor? Will I be safer there? As you know, Christianity is built upon Judaism and so, if the latter tumbles, the former will necessarily fall over it in one heap of rubble.
Mendelssohn's house metaphor from the beginning of the first part reappears at the beginning of the second part. Here he used it to reflect the historical fact that Christianity never developed its own ethics independent from the Ten Commandments, which are still part of the canonic redaction of the Christian Bible.
Lavater serves here as a more or less moderate example of the hypocritic religious man, whose religion is the favoured and the dominating one within the political system. Like in Hobbes' scenario he likes, what the system allows him to do – at least in this case: forcing another citizen to convert to the dominating religion.
But this hypocrisy reflects once more the radicalism of Moses Mendelssohn's contract of tolerance: If the religion's business has to be reduced to the "inner side" and religion itself cannot be the formal subject of this contract, it simply means that state affairs like executive, legislature and judiciary will be no longer religious affairs. Nevertheless, he was denying the contemporary practice of rabbinic jurisdiction, which was hardly acceptable for a lot of orthodox Jews. And one year after the publication of his book the denial of rabbinic jurisdiction became political practice in the Habsburg monarchy, when a state edict, added to the "tolerance patent", submitted Jewish subjects to its own law court without regarding them on an equal footing with Christian subjects.
Moses Mendelssohn is supposed to be the first Maskilim of his time who denied the present conditions and the rabbinic practice attached to it. This condition was that each Jewish community had its own jurisdiction and that the coexistence of several communities often corrected judges. His proposition must not only regarded as very modern, it turned out to be substantial during the discussions of the French Legislative Assembly concerning the Jewish emancipation during the 1790s. In these debates Judaism was often supposed to be an "own nation within the nation" and the Jewish representatives had to abandon this former status, so that the Jewish population will gain the new status as equal citizens and that they will participate in the new law of the French constitution.
In his pragmatism Mendelssohn had to convince the Jewish population that they have to abandon the tradition of rabbinic jurisdiction, but in the same time they have no reason to feel inferior, because some Christians believe that the moral conditions of Jewish tradition has to be regarded as inferior to their theological concept of absolution.
It was up to the Christians to find the way back to their fundament, which was the Mosaic law. But it was up to the Jews to face the present situation, in which Jewish communities were abandoned by a wealthy and privileged minority, so that poverty was increasing rapidly – especially in the town ghettos. In his philosophy Moses Mendelssohn reacted to the change from medieval conditions among the communities, when an elite between rich and rabbinic families was ruling the community. New privileges were granted by the Prussian state to rich members of the community, so that they finally left the community by conversion. But Mendelssohn regarded beneficence less as a "coerce responsibility" than as a voluntary act of wealthy members.
Moses Mendelssohn created a syncretism which combined contemporary humanistic idealism and its deistic concept of a natural religion based on rational principles with the living tradition of Ashkenasic Judaism. His adoration of the Mosaic law should not be misunderstood as a kind of historical criticism, it was based on an own politically motivated interpretation of the Torah as a divine revelation which was offered to the prophet Moses, so that he will save Judaism from its materialistic decline, symbolized in worshipping the golden calf and idolatry, by the divine law.
For Moses Mendelssohn the Mosaic law was "divine", as long as the community following its principles would be just. The attribute "divine" was simply given by the law's function to create a just social fabric: the social contract in itself. The eternal truth of the law was bound to this function, and it was so less achievable, that any judgement of a rabbi had to be judged according to Salomonic Wisdom. Mendelssohn referred to an anecdote of the Hillel school of Mishnah which has in itself an own theological formulation of the categorical imperative as Kant would later call it on:
Ein Heide sprach: Rabbi, lehret mich das ganze Gesetz, indem ich auf einem Fuße stehe! Samai, an dem er diese Zumuthung vorher ergehen ließ, hatte ihn mit Verachtung abgewiesen; allein der durch seine unüberwindliche Gelassenheit und Sanftmuth berühmte Hillel sprach: Sohn! liebe deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst. Dieses ist der Text des Gesetzes; alles übrige ist Kommentar. Nun gehe hin und lerne!
A goy said: "Rabbi, teach me the whole law, on which I stand with one foot!" Shammai to whom he addressed before with the same impertinence, disregardfully refused him. But Hillel who was famous for his insuperable serenity and mildness, replied: "Son! love thy neighbour as thyself. [Leviticus 19:18] This is the text of the law, the rest is commentary. Now go and learn!"
With this biblical proverb, often quoted in the New Testament including the beatitudes, Mendelssohn returned to the deistic adoration of the Mosaic law as the Jewish-Christian contribution to universal ethics:
Diese Verfassung ist ein einziges Mal da gewesen: nennet sie die mosaische Verfassung, bey ihrem Einzelnamen. Sie ist verschwunden, und ist dem Allwissenden allein bekannt, bey welchem Volke und in welchem Jahrhunderte sich etwas Aehnliches wieder wird sehen lassen.
The constitution had been here only once: you may call it the mosaic Constitution, which was its name. It has disappeared, and only the Almighty knows, in which nation and in which century something similar will appear again.
"Mosaic Constitution" was just the Jewish name of the democratic constitution, as it was called by their ancestors. And probably some Jews were waiting for it like for a Messiah who would once unban them from feudal slavery.
The argument through which he inspired Lessing in his drama Nathan der Weise, was the following: Each religion has not to be judged in itself, but only the acts of a citizen who keeps faith with it, according to a just law. This kind of law constitutes a just state, in which the people of different faith may live together in peace.
According to his philosophy the new charge of any religion in general was not jurisdiction, but education as a necessary preparation to become a just citizen. Mendelssohn's point of view was that of a teacher who translated a lot of classical rabbinic authors like Maimonides from Hebrew into German, so that a Jewish child would be attracted to learn German and Hebrew in the same time.
At the end of his book Mendelssohn returns to the real political conditions in Habsburg, French and Prussian Monarchy, because he was often asked to support Jewish communities in their territories. In fact none of these political systems were offering the tolerant conditions, so that every subject should have the same legal status regardless to his or her religious faith. (In his philosophy Mendelssohn discussed the discrimination of the individuum according to its religion, but not according to its gender.) On the other hand, a modern education which Mendelssohn regarded still as a religious affair, required a reformation of the religious communities and especially their organization of the education which has to be modernized.
As long as the state did not follow John Locke's requirement concerning the "freedom of conscience", any trial of an ethic education would be useless at all and every subject would be forced to live in separation according to their religious faith. Reflecting the present conditions Mendelssohn addresses – directly in the second person – to the political authorities:
Ihr solltet glauben, uns nicht brüderlich wieder lieben, euch mit uns nicht bürgerlich vereinigen zu können, so lange wir uns durch das Zeremonialgesetz äusserlich unterscheiden, nicht mit euch essen, nicht von euch heurathen, das, so viel wir einsehen können, der Stifter eurer Religion selbst weder gethan, noch uns erlaubt haben würde? — Wenn dieses, wie wir von christlich gesinnten Männern nicht vermuthen können, eure wahre Gesinnung seyn und bleiben sollte; wenn die bürgerliche Vereinigung unter keiner andern Bedingung zu erhalten, als wenn wir von dem Gesetze abweichen, das wir für uns noch für verbindlich halten; so thut es uns herzlich leid, was wir zu erklären für nöthig erachten: so müssen wir auf bürgerliche Vereinigung Verzicht thun; so mag der Menschenfreund Dohm vergebens geschrieben haben, und alles in dem leidlichen Zustande bleiben, in welchem es itzt ist, in welchem es eure Menschenliebe zu versetzen, für gut findet. […] Von dem Gesetze können wir mit gutem Gewissen nicht weichen, und was nützen euch Mitbürger ohne Gewissen?
You should think, that you are not allowed to return our brotherly love, to unite with us as equal citizens, as long as there is any formal divergence in our religious rite, so that we do not eat together with you and do not marry one of yours, which the founder of your religion, as far as we can see, neither would have done, nor would have allowed us? — If this has to be and to remain your real opinion, as we may not expect of men following the Christian ethos; if a civil unification is only available on the condition that we differ from the law which we are already considering as binding, then we have to announce – with deep regret – that we do better to abstain from the civil unification; then the philanthropist Dohm has probably written in vain and everything will remain on the awkward condition – as it is now and as your charity has chosen it. […] We cannot differ from the law with a clear conscience and what will be your use of citizens without conscience?
In this paragraph it becomes very evident, that Moses Mendelssohn did not foresee the willingness of some Jewish men and women who left some years later their communities, because they do not want to suffer from a lower legal status any longer.
